Joe Guzzardi: VP sweepstakes coming into final stretch

Former President Donald J. Trump may be tied up in a Manhattan courtroom, but he’s active online.

One of his fundraising efforts asks supporters to help him choose his vice president. In a mass email, Trump asked, “Which person would you select as your next vice president? Type in the person’s name here.”

Trump will make up his own mind, but the potential candidates list is long, and his choice is important. A significant faction of registered GOP voters dubious about Trump’s candidacy could be swayed toward the former president based on his VP selection.

Even though Nikki Haley abandoned her presidential campaign in early March after losing all but one state in Super Tuesday’s primary races, she’s still managed to clinch 13% to 18% of the GOP electorate in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Haley’s performance causes GOP insiders to question whether her supporters will ultimately back Trump, cross party lines or simply stay home.

Among the names being bandied about for Trump’s VP are three U.S. senators: Ohio’s JD Vance, Florida’s Marco Rubio and South Carolina’s Tim Scott. Other names include Reps. Byron Scott of Florida and Elise Stefanik of New York, but forget them. If Trump wins, he’ll need every congressional supporting vote he can get, and to remove five certain yeas from Congress on his agenda would be folly.

Another name mentioned is also a highly unlikely choice. Although Trump flew North Dakota governor and onetime 2024 presidential hopeful Doug Burgum to his Wildwood, N.J, rally, the moderate is, like the presumptive nominee, an old, white billionaire. North Dakota has three electoral votes, and in 2016 and 2020 Trump won the state by a 2:1 ratio. Trump would gain nothing from an electoral college angle if he added Burgum to the ticket.

That narrows the prospects down to Tulsi Gabbard, who, in many ways, is an ideal VP choice. Gabbard is young, attractive, well-spoken, a former four-term House Democrat and an Iraq War veteran. In 2022, Gabbard abandoned the Democratic Party because of its shift to the far left, or as she put it, is “now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, undermines Americans’ God-given freedoms, demonizes the police but protects criminals, encourages open borders, weaponizes national security for politics’ sake, and pushes the country ever closer to nuclear war.”

On voters’ top concern, immigration, Gabbard’s grade while she was in the House was as bad as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, F-. Gabbard was on the wrong side of every important immigration issue — she voted against stronger border and interior enforcement, and in favor of expanding worker visas that displace employed Americans. Her congressional votes showed that, at the time she cast them, she encouraged amnesty enticements and rewarded illegal aliens. Another irrevocable negative: Gabbard endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and, after she ended her own presidential campaign, Biden in 2020.

Trump promises to name his VP before the GOP national convention in Milwaukee in July. In the end, he may not choose Gabbard, but he absolutely cannot remove any of his congressional allies.